Him said:
I dunno man. I know tons of people who are running a pirated version of Windows, always updating and everything. They have yet to lock up due to the "homeland security act". Thats insane. Since when did that act have anything to do with licensing on Microsoft Windows? I really dont see how that is a matter of national security.
I had some words with an ex-lawyer of MS a little while back. He told me lots of facts about EULA's and such. MS really dosent care about the average end user having illegal copies, because they will end up paying their lawyers more money to come after you than they will get out of you. They are after the buisnesses running on 600 illegal copies, so they can sue for $25,000 per illegal. They are concerned with the back alley operations that are spitting out 1000 copies a day of XP and selling them for $50 a whack.
MS will take two situations, where pirating is a problem, and apply the formula:
a. is the amount of copies they are selling. B is the amount they are selling them for. X is the cost of the lawyers. If A x B is greater than X, then they have no reason to go after said person.
But yes I do agree with you chris, it is very unfair to system builders. We cant stay in competition with these people if we have to spend an extra $200 on an OS.
Wow. First you misquote me. when I talk of homeland security, I talking about all of the bullship laws that are taking away our rights everyday and the ablilty of rich people to openly commit crime yet they aren't construed as crime.
despite everybody that think they know, I dare to get you a corp edition of xp pro with the key H2HYJ-28PQM-6HGFG-CWMMD-V2C62
and got to windows update. 3 years ago this version of xp was floating around everywhere. thousands of people had this copy
one day in august and september 2 or 3 years ago., thousands of people computer got lock up all at once. some companies with legit version of xp got locked up too. a lot of this mishap got blame on the msblast virus but in actualality a lot of it was microsuck locking up people computer.
I got rich off of this. there was a guy around here with a computer shop who install that xp pro on hundred of computers and he charge them for a legit copy. I spent weeks fixing a lot of those computers. he is jail now.
now sometimes microsoft claim to lock these computer's, other times they deny it. they had an article a few month with MS talking about locking up computers oversea, but in the end they couldn't because those companies had different laws (hence me mentioning homeland security)
now MS can't tell all copies of pirated software. they can't tell those with the activation crack, but they can tell the activation crack is on there (that was the old crack. crack. somebody here mention that there's a new one that they can't tell. I dunno. I use legit versions. they are only 99.00 for xp and 130.00 for mce2005). there are also some other versions that they can't tell.
but they make a point of find the one that are freely floating around the internet that thousands of people own and they will lock it up. I just fix a lady computer 3 weeks ago, they wouldn't log on. it said it would not log on because she was using a pirated copy of windows XP.